It started with a silly little thing — Barb couldn’t find her favorite kitchen towel. Not exactly grand larceny, but irritating.
When the towel disappeared, she went looking for Jessica, her youngest. At five, Jessica was notorious for picking up odds and ends around the house, regardless of prior ownership, and using them for her own devices.
“Mommy,” Jessica protested after the third are-you-sure probe, “I swear I didn’t take it. Cross my heart and hope to die!” Barbara trusted her artless naiveté.
Barb sought Jimmy, who was fond of using her cleanest, thickest bathroom towels to polish his skateboard. “Nope,” from the thirteen-year-old. “Kitchen towels get greasy. I’d never use a kitchen towel. Just bathroom ones. Clean bathroom ones.”
Alexandra, a pretty ten-going-on-sixteen-year-old, looked at her blankly, then said, “Mom, what in the world would I be doing with a kitchen towel? I don’t even do dishes! You should check with Allegra,” she added. “The kitchen is her domain.”
Instead of going to Allegra’s twin six-year-old boys, Hugo and Lido, Barb decided to follow Alexandra’s advice. She found the overweight housekeeper puttering in what had once been a formal dining room but now used by Barbara as a makeshift study. “Allegra! Where is my new blue kitchen towel? The one with the little ducks and geese appliquéd on it?”
“No lo se, señora,” Allegra answered, suddenly dusting a bookshelf with unusual vigor and refusing to meet Barb’s gaze with her own — equally unusual. Allegra might be fat, Barb thought, and she might be lazy, and without question she was overly superstitious. But she was never slow to look someone in the eye. As Barb turned to leave the room, she glimpsed Allegra crossing herself in the periphery of her vision.
Well if it was Allegra who took it, Barb thought as she headed toward the kitchen to start dinner, she must have had good reason. Complete honesty was Allegra’s greatest virtue, if only through fear of unearthly retribution. And sooner or later she’d come clean and confess. She always did.
So Barb forgot about it.
Cobwebs were getting a little thick in the ceiling corners, Barb pointed out to Allegra about a week later, and wondered at the way her eyes widened—with fear?—when Barb asked her to get them down.
The same night, near bedtime, Barb made herself a pot of her favorite herb tea. As a single mother providing sole support for her extended household, she worked overtime whenever possible. This day had been particularly long and grueling, and she wanted nothing more than to curl up in bed with a hot cup of chamomile laced with a strong dollop of honey.
The honey was gone.
“Where’s my honey!” She screamed so loud that the old walls shuddered. “Where’s my honey!” It wasn’t a question, it was a decree that compelled everyone to immediately show up in the oversized kitchen with its narrow cabinet doors and faded wallpaper that failed to cover all the cracks.
Complacent Jimmy broke the tension. “What’s up, mom?”
“Where’s my honey?” Barb asked, only slightly more softly. “I just bought a new honey bear three days ago and now I can’t find it anywhere.”
“I dunno,” Jimmy shrugged and disappeared back into the bowels of his room to watch “The Next Generation.” The rest of the kids just shrugged, and wandered out in ones and twos.
Again Allegra would not meet her eyes.
“Allegra?”
“No lo se verdad, señora.” Allegra always lapsed into Spanish when she was very, very nervous. A bad sign.
“You don’t know what, Allegra?”
“I don’t know where is your honey. And is time now for the little ones to bed. I go.” With that she disappeared.
The following weekend, Barb began a complete inventory of everything in her ancient, three-story Victorian. The neighborhood was bad, but she had good locks on the doors and bars on the ground-floor windows, and she’d never before worried about theft. The only other item she discovered missing, however, was a very old, very ratty fox collar that she’d held on to for years with the vague intention of sewing it onto something or another.
Sunday evening, she called a family conference. Jimmy helped little Jessica slide down the banister of the central stairway into the arched foyer that led to the kitchen, while Alexandra maintained a slow and stately princess pace on the steps, posing for a brief moment on the second-floor landing before continuing her descent.
Allegra called her boys in from the back yard, trying unsuccessfully to wipe some of the dirt from their matching round faces before they sat at the table that took up a large part of the kitchen.
Once everyone had settled in, Barb began to speak. “Things are vanishing. Little things, stupid things. But things that are important to me. I want to know who’s doing it, and I want to know why.”
The children—all five—looked utterly bored. But Allegra, who kept staring at the table surface, trying to scrape off a bit of non-existent dirt with her fingernail, looked ready to cry. Barb dismissed the children, and when Allegra started to get up with them, Barb stopped her. She waited until the kids were all out of earshot before speaking.
“Tell me why you’re doing this, Allegra. You’re not going to get into trouble. I just want to understand.”
“Oh señora,” the woman cried, her grief causing the folds of flesh that draped her bare upper arms to flutter with a life of their own, “is not me. You are a good, good woman, and I never do nothing bad to you, never!”
“But you know something,” Barb persisted.
“Sí, I know. Es una cosa maliciosa. ¡Muy maliciosa! Very bad!” And she began crossing herself openly.
“Allegra…”
The tears began to pour, Allegra’s chin quivered as a single phrase continued to spill from her tortured mouth: “¡La araña gigante, una araña inteligenta!”
“Stay right there,” she said to Allegra before running through the crested arch that let into what could have been a formal dining room but that had been converted into a makeshift study. Barb grabbed her Spanish dictionary and already had it open to the A’s before she sat again at the table with Allegra whose despair was finally beginning to spend.
Barb’s finger moved down the column. ARA, for the sake of; ARADO, a plow; ARANDELA, drip catcher on a candle stick …
“Araña.” Barb found the word, then looked up at Allegra with confusion as she read the definition out loud. “‘Spider, or chandelier.’ We don’t have a chandelier.”
Allegra, still not trusting herself to speak, held up her fat hands with their delicate pointed fingers, and wiggled the fingers like eight active legs.
“Spider? A giant, intelligent spider?”
Allegra’s sobs renewed with their original vigor. And her right hand flew from forehead, to chest, to left and right shoulder in a repeated, comforting pattern.
“Allegra, what are you talking about?”
The wave of emotion began to calm, and Allegra spoke very slowly, with a self-control that was admirable. “In the top of the house,” she started tentatively.
“The attic?”
“Sí. The araña, the spider, she live there.” The words were out, and Allegra seemed to lighten physically as she passed the responsibility of this knowledge on to her patrona.
Barb was not impressed. “We’ve always had spiders, Allegra. But spiders don’t steal towels. And they don’t steal honey bears. And they are not generally considered intelligent.”
“Pero señora, this spider is very big. Muy espantarse.” She extended her arms as far as she could to emphasize.
“So you can just show me this giant spider,” Barb said, standing up, and opening the cabinet where she kept a large flashlight.
Together, the two of them started climbing the narrow three-and-a-half-flight stair that led into the attic, Barb in the front and Allegra breathing heavily in the rear. As they climbed, Allegra tried to explain her protective logic in keeping the dreadful secret to herself.
“I no tell you before, señora, porque I know how hard you work, I no want to worry you, and the spider, she no hace malo para la familia, she no make bad. I hope if I no say nada she go away sometime.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Barb grunted, having forgotten just how steep this particular flight of stairs were. “And I’m sure, when we get there, she will be gone.”
When they reached the top, Allegra touched her arm gently. “Cuidado, por favor.” Careful, please.
Barb pushed against the board that covered the attic trap, and it didn’t move. It had been years since she’d been up here, but she didn’t remember the board being so heavy. She pushed again, and suddenly the board sprang up and fell to one side. Cobwebs covered the opening. Barb brushed bravely against the webs, ignoring a apprehensive tightening in her sphincter as she did so. She flashed her light into the attic. At first, dust seemed to be suspended midair as she panned the light around the room, her head poking up into the enclosure. Then she realized that the entire attic area seemed to be one delicately-massed network of webs.
Barb was nervous, but working hard to maintain a bravado. “So where’s your giant –” spider, she started to ask Allegra. But before she could finish the sentence, a slight motion caught her peripheral attention. Turning the beam directly toward the motion, she gasped, dropped the flashlight, and fell back down, pulling the trap cover back in place.
“Oh my god,” she said, looking at Allegra. “You were telling the truth.”
Allegra suddenly looked her normal self, smug and contemptuous. “So señora, what we do now, eh?”
The two women climbed back down the stairs to the kitchen. Allegra put the water on to boil for tea, while Barb sat at the table thinking.
Finally, she made a decision. Picking up the phone, she dialed 9-1-1.
# #
Barb had made Allegra promise not to tell the children about the spider, and they were all in bed and asleep before the patrol car glided to a smooth halt outside her front door.
The officers joined Barb in what might have been called a parlor if the furnishings had been just a little less stained and worn, and one officer began to fill out a report. He stopped when he verified that the words giant and spider had been included in her call.
“And you think this spider is intelligent, ma’am?” he asked, almost but not quite keeping a straight face.
“I’ve been thinking about that part,” Barb admitted, “and I’m not sure that intelligent is the right word. You see, we’ve always had lots of pest problems in the house—not just rats and roaches, but flies, ants, and when the weather’s really hot, fleas.”
Both officers shifted in their seats, as though wondering whether their chairs might be flea-ridden.
“Since stuff started disappearing, so have the bugs. So I figure the spider has been setting traps. The honey could be used to attract roaches, flies and ants, the towel would have made a nice rat’s nest, and the fur would have been good for—”
“Catching fleas?” the younger policeman asked without trying to hide a snide grin. The senior officer shot him a look.
“Well yes! It makes sense logically, don’t you think?
The policemen offered to take a look in her attic, so she pointed them up the stairs, then sat back down to await their return. It didn’t take long, and both men came back down with a new respect shining in their formerly skeptical eyes.
“Ma’am,” the older policeman told her, “I’ve seen some strange things in my fifteen years on the force, but this really takes the cake.”
“So you can do something about it then?” she asked. “Shoot it, or arrest it, or confiscate it or something?”
Both officers looked like they wanted nothing better than to get out of there ASAP. “I’m really sorry, ma’am, but giant spiders don’t fall under the jurisdiction of the LAPD.” He pulled out his card and scribbled something on the back of it. “Here’s a number for the county pest control department. I know about it because my wife had them out to help her with a rat problem a couple of weeks ago,” he added almost apologetically.
Barb slept badly, and the next morning she called the number the policeman had given her. They promised to send someone out immediately, so she took the day off from work.
It didn’t help her humor when the promised agent didn’t show until three in the afternoon. And the agent herself also did nothing to sooth Barb’s rattled nerves.
“Mrs. Suttleman,” she said, stiffly and formally, “I understand that you have a pest infestation.”
“You can call me Barb,” said Barb, who was much more comfortable in informal situations.
“Mrs. Suttleman,” said the woman, “you may call me Ms. Smith. Now please describe your problem.”
Barb explained about the giant spider in the attic, and how the spider was stealing things. The woman was impatient to the point of rudeness.
“Please don’t expect me to believe wild stories of giant spiders. I am a government employee, paid out of citizens’ taxes, and you, Mrs. Suttleman, are wasting the taxpayers’ money. Good day.”
She stood to leave, and Barb, desperate, grabbed her arm, pleading. “Please just have a look for yourself. I’m not inventing stories, I can’t sleep at night, and I’m terrified something will happen to the children. I don’t know who else to call!”
So Ms. Smith climbed the stairs to the attic. Barb heard a few heavy thumps, but the woman never came down again.
Barb was frantic with fear. If the spider could catch the woman, she could catch a child. Or an overweight housekeeper. Or Barb.
She called the police again, this time to report a missing county pest control agent. The same two officers showed up to investigate, and when she told them what happened, they offered condolences, had Ms. Smith’s car towed, and flatly refused to go into the attic to investigate. The younger policeman offered to buy Barb a can of Raid. She thanked him and showed the officers to the door.
That night, Barb forgot to lock the doors. Her neighborhood was unsavory, and she normally took thorough precautions to secure the house after dark. But for once she was more concerned with the threat inside her walls than threats from outside, and she was a little more distracted than usual.
Barb was still wide awake at 4:07 AM when she heard a suspicious noise in the hallway outside of her room. Her first thought was of the spider. Had it come down into the house looking for juicier prey now that it had gotten a taste of Ms. Smith?
She was still deciding whether to try phoning the police again or just to rouse the kids and run for it when the choice was taken from her. The bedroom door slid open, and through the darkness, she saw a shape looming over her—comfortingly human, until she recognized the gleam of faint moonlight that reflected dimly from the barrel of a gun. The recognition was confirmed when the stranger pressed the gun against her temple.
“Scream and I’ll blow your brains out,” a nasty voice said.
“What do you want?” Barb asked.
“Money, jewelry. Small valuables. Now move!”
She got up slowly, the gun held parallel to her every move. She was being robbed. Almost too mundane to believe.
She went to her purse, opened it, and pulled out her wallet. Seventeen dollars and twenty-three cents.
The robber hit her across the face with his pistol, then shoved the money into his pocket. “Not enough for a fix, lady. I need more!”
Her jaw was numb from the strike, and Barb knew that it would begin to sting and swell shortly. Less concerned that he would hit her again than she was that Jessica might wake up from a bad dream and wander in, Barb’s mind raced. “I’ve got some- some very valuable silverware, family heirloom stuff, really worth a lot.”
“Take me to it.”
Barb led him to the attic, chattering nervously as they went through the hall, praying desperately that everyone would stay asleep. “It’s in the attic, I packed it away years ago because we never use it. Very formal stuff, really nice.”
“Shut up,” he said, and she gratefully complied.
They went down the stairs and through the kitchen. Barb noticed the backdoor standing wide open, apparently the junkie’s entry point. When they reached the little back stair that led to the attic, Barb pointed. “Straight up, three and a half flights. Then lift the cover.”
“Yeah, lady, like I’m gonna leave you down here to call the cops while I’m digging around in your attic. Move!”
With the gun pressed to her back, Barb took each step one at a time, trying not to think about what was waiting at the end of the journey. They reached the attic trap, and Barb carefully slid the cover back, while her uninvited guest kept the gun trained on her. She expected him to climb up, but instead, he gestured with the gun that she should go up.
Shaking, Barb climbed into the attic. It was the darkest space she’d ever been in, and she couldn’t move without the claustrophobic feel of cobwebs closing in on her. She pushed her way just a few feet into the attic, then sat down in the grime and started whispering earnestly.
“Look, spider. We have a lot in common. We’re both single women just trying to get through a life that isn’t very kind or easy.” Terrified, she felt a heavy presence a few feet away, then heard a terrifying shuffle in the darkness. Taking a deep breath, she continued. “I don’t really have anything against spiders. In fact, since you’ve been here, lots of other insects have disappeared. Which is cool. Maybe we can work something out to share this old house. It’s big enough, and we could, oh, I don’t know, maybe get some sort of symbiotic thing going. But right now I’ve got a very serious problem.”
The junkie called up. “What’s taking so long, bitch! I gotta get outta here!”
“That’s my problem. You can have him if you want him. He’s a really bad person. I just don’t want my family hurt.” The sounds of motion in the darkness again, and Barb was so scared she wanted to vomit.
“It’s dark up here,” she answered the junkie. “You got a match or something?”
The junkie climbed up, laid down his gun on the dusty floor, and struck a match.
“Do it now, please!” Barb said.
The junkie looked at her strangely for a moment in the flickering light, then a dark mass covered him and the light went out.
Barb did not remember climbing back down the stairs or getting back into bed. But the next day she didn’t wake up until well past noon, and when she finally rose, she felt as though she’d slept better than she had in years.
Light, refreshed, she wondered if she’d dreamed the whole incident from the night before. In fact, she wondered if she’d dreamed the whole spider thing. Wouldn’t that be grand, she told herself, if this had all been a dream and now it was over?
So she sent the kids out to play, badgered Allegra into walking down to the local market to pick up some things, and climbed alone into the attic.
The gun was still lying where it had been dropped. It wasn’t a dream.
Somehow, though, Barb wasn’t worried anymore. And she stopped asking Allegra to clean the cobwebs out of corners. They gave her a sense of security that she hadn’t had since her husband had died.
She knew though, that sooner or later there’d be another problem to deal with. Spiders lay eggs. And those eggs hatch into little baby spiders. And she wondered if the next generation would be as willing to work with a struggling mother trying to support her family in a bad part of town.
One day at a time, she told herself. One day at a time.
